In A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, Joseph A. Maciariello provides the thematic equivalent of a calendar year of personal supervision by Peter Drucker to each person who reads this book. He is now doing for many what Drucker did only for a Few. Peter Drucker mentored numerous people especially during his last 20 years. The results have been impressive. This project seeks to document this successful mentoring process using unpublished work and extend its usefulness to others with a particular emphasis on 20-30 year olds, members of the millennial generation. Now everyone who reads this book can be mentored by the business thinker who is widely regarded as “the world’s greatest authority on management,” a designation that Drucker despised.

In his own words, here are Drucker’s defining characteristics of effective leaders:

1. “Make the important rather than the urgent the most important priority in life.”

2. “Trust is the conviction that a leader always means what she says.”

3. “Effective leadership…is based primarily on being consistent.”

4. “The supreme quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity.”

5. “It is typical of the most successful and durable organizations that they induce in their members an intellectual and moral growth beyond [a person’s] original capacities.”

If asked, other experts who have stood atop Drucker’s shoulders would add these characteristics of effective leaders:

o Always ask the right questions and are a great listener

o Others are eager to be on their “team”

o Are lifelong learners

o Embrace challenges with passion

o Delight in helping others to succeed

To learn more about Peter Drucker, please click here.

To learn more about Joe Maciariello, please click here.

Here’s a direct link to my book review of A Year with Peter Drucker.